Therapist: “Sounds interesting.”
Patient: “In this dream I was walking down a strange street. A sexy-looking woman standing behind a Dutch door beckoned to me. I hesitated for a second, then against my better judgment, I went into the house.”
Therapist: “Horrendous! [Pronounced heartily with a j: horrenjus!]” †
In the study of a spoken language event, a written transcription is, of course, wholly unacceptable.‡ All phonetics and vocal modifiers are omitted. Even a tap recording is inadequate since it does not transmit gestures. In my comment on this exchange, moreover, I will say nothing of such strictly linguistic analyses as might be made of phonemes, morphemes, and grammar. Nor shall I say anything about the “content” of the exchange — for example, the dream and its “meaning”—important though this may be in the patient’s dynamics. But if one does not consider the linguistics and content of the language event, what else remains to be said about it? What remains is nothing else but the particular structure of the symbolic behavior, of which the symbolic tetrad is the generic type (see Figure 2). The assumption that all that is going on is an interaction between organisms deprives the investigator of the means of taking account of the molar event of communication, leaving him only with the alternative of fitting as best he can the qualitative traits of interpersonal behavior into the Procrustean bed of a response psychology. But once the generic character of symbolic behavior is recognized, then the modes of intersubjectivity, “world,” “being-in-a-world,” and assertory identity are seen as particular expressions of the fundamental possibilities allowed by the structure of interpersonal process — just as drives, needs, reinforcement and extinction, stimulus, response, are the fundamental categories of organismic interaction.
The mode of assertory identity. It may very well be that some of the assertory behavior in this example is magical. The patient is an educated layman, the sort who takes pride in being well informed in scientific matters, especially psychiatry, and in his use of psychiatric jargon. He quite consciously uses “analyst” rather than “psychoanalyst.” One often notices in psychiatric interviews a kind of pseudo reversal of the roles of scientist and layman. The patient often uses such phrases as “Oedipus complex” (he would never say “inferiority complex,” since it passed long ago into everyday usage, passing, moreover, as a semantic husk of very questionable value), “sibling rivalry,” “aggressions,” and so forth, while the therapist is careful to steer clear of them, partly because he does not wish to use a technical phrase the patient would not understand, but perhaps even more because he is intuitively aware of the magic abuses to which expertise is peculiarly susceptible.* The patient in question may have, by reason of this very knowledgeability about psychiatry, fallen prey to a magic mode of identification. The clause Since you are an analyst very likely asserts a mystical transformation by which an ordinary human being is transfigured and informed by the resplendent scientific symbols “psychiatrist” and “psychoanalyst” and finally by the shorthand expression used among the elite, “analyst.”
The world of the therapist and his being-in-the-world. Insofar as he is a scientist, the therapist has assumed the posture of objectivity. As a consequence of what might be called the Thalesian revolution, men have learned, beginning at about the time of the Ionian philosophers and the Vedantists of the epic period,† to strike a theoretical posture toward the world which would enable them to discover the underlying principles and causes by which particular things and events can be understood. The scientist is not in his world in the same way, as, say, a member of a cosmological culture like the Bororo tribesmen, nor as a wanderer between cultures like Abraham, nor even as his fellow culture members, the businessman and the streetcar conductor. Insofar as he practices his science, he stands, in Buber’s phrase, “over against” his world as knower and manipulator of that which can be known and manipulated. The scientist may so be characterized without pejoration — indeed if he were in his world in any other way, he could hardly be a scientist. Yet as a psychiatrist, a “participant observer,” he must also re-enter the world in some mode or other as a person who is friendly and sympathetic, or anyhow appears so, to his patient.
The single utterance of the therapist, “horrenjus,” reveals a mode of the participant-observer stance, of necessity a kind of straddle in which the therapist stands outside and over against the world — including his patient — and yet enters into an interpersonal relation with his patient. He accomplishes the feat in this case through a kind of indulgent playfulness, tempered effectively, as McQuown comments, by his use of his pipe. The playful irony of “horrenjus!” pronounced with an exaggerated vaudeville-British propriety, expresses mock scandal at the patient’s decision to approach the woman in his dream, a device which serves at once to neutralize the patient’s anxiety and to extend to him a friendly hand: Come join me in a bit of good-natured deprecation of the Puritan streak in our culture. Yet, as sincerely warm as the therapist may feel toward his patient, there is hardly a second when his own objective placement in the world is not operative.* In fact, the very act which expresses his friendliness, the horrenjus! and the indulgent pipe-fondling behavior, also serves to set him gently but firmly apart as an elite-member, a tolerant Thalesian revolutionary who has made it his business to stand over against a sector of reality and study it according to the objective method.
The stance of the pure scientist is that of objectivity, a standing over against the world, the elements of which serve as specimens or instances of the various classes of objects and events which comprise his science. The behavior of the scientist, like any other mode of symbolic behavior, also implies a dimension of intersubjectivity; this is, of course, the community of other scientists engaged in the same specialty. Whether he is working with a colleague or alone, publishing or not publishing, the very nature of the scientific method with its moments of observation, concept formation, hypothesizing, verification, is a making public, a formulation for someone else.
But in the psychiatric interview the objective stance of the scientist with its attendant community of other scientists is overlaid by a second interpersonal relation, that of the therapist with his patient. This relation differs from that between the therapist and his colleagues. The latter is a Thalesian community, which is set apart from the everyday world by its esoteric knowledge of the underlying principles of some world phenomena. The relation between the therapist and his patient is, or at least might be, very much in the world. It might be called a Samaritan-Jew dyad — one man in trouble and another man going out of his way to help him.
The world of the patient and his being-in-the-world. This patient is in his world in a way wholly different from that of his therapist, yet it is a way which is heavily influenced by the presence of science in the world. The patient, let me postulate, is the sort of person who has also adopted the objective point of view but has adopted it secondhand. He is convinced that the scientific world view is the right way of looking at things, but since he is not a scientist and does not spend his time practicing the objective method, his objective-mindedness raises some problems. Deprived of the firsthand encounter with the subject matter which the scientist enjoys, he is even more apt than the scientist to fall prey to what Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”* and so to bestow upon theory, or what he imagines to be theory, a superior reality at the expense of the reality of the very world he lives in. His problem is not, as is the scientist’s, What sense can I make of the data before me? but is instead, How can I live in a world which I have disposed of theoretically? He is like the schoolgirl who, on seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, is unimpressed, either because she has already “had” it in geology or because she has not yet had it. Such a misplacement of the concrete is a serious matter because, although one may dispose of the world through theory, one is not thereby excused from the necessity of living in this same world. This patient’s mode of life is open to considerable anxiety and he is apt to conceive of his predicament and its remedy in the following terms: I am having trouble living in the world which I see objectively; therefore I shall apply for relief to the very source of my world view, the scientist himself. His seduction by theory is such, however, as to place him almost beyond the reach of the therapist. Paradoxically, it is his veneration of psychiatry which all but disqualifies him as a candidate for psychiatric treatment. For it is a necessary condition of the therapist’s method that he abstract to a degree from the individuality of his patient and see him as an instance of, a “case of,” such and such a malfunction.* But the patient is peculiarly prone to extrapolate a methodology into a way of living. He is pleased when the dream he offers to the therapist turns out to be a recognizable piece of pathology. He does not conceive a higher existence for himself than to be “what one should be” according to psychiatry. But science cannot tell one how to live; it can only abstract some traits from a number of people who do manage to live well — he has read no doubt that one should have an “integrated personality” or that one should be “creative” or “autonomous,” and the like. But the patient who sets out to become an integrated personality has embarked on a very peculiar enterprise. An almost intractable misunderstanding is apt to arise between therapist and patient. It is of this order: The therapist offers the assistance of the method and technique of his science and hopes that the patient can make use of it to become the individual he is capable of becoming. But the patient in his anonymity labors under the chronic misapprehension that he is trying to become “one of those”—that is, an integrated personality. The patient as good as asks: Am I doing it right now? Am I not now an individual in my own right?